The Yahoo Boys: The men behind online romance scams
In an extract from his new book The Yahoo Boys: Real Life with the Love Scammers of Lagos, journalist CARLOS BARRAGÁN travels to Lagos to uncover the truth behind romance scams
When journalist Carlos Barragán’s mother fell in love with a man she had never met, it seemed too good to be true. She would spend hours chatting to Brian, “a handsome, divorced fifty-two-year-old American soldier,” seemingly unaware she was being conned. It was only when Brian promised to send her a fortune in gold bars that Barragán and his siblings intervened, exposing the scam. His mother quickly moved on but Barragán found himself returning to the incident again and again, wondering how an intelligent woman could fall for such an obvious ruse, and what kind of person might be behind it.
Barragán had traced the origin of an email from “Brian” to Lagos and four years later, he quit his job as a reporter in Spain and bought a one way ticket to Nigeria, where he had arranged to meet a fixer called Bukola Omoseni. When Omoseni fell ill with malaria and typhoid, Barragán found himself living in a cramped apartment with one of the so-called Yahoo Boys, the Nigerian scammers named after their favoured email provider.
From there he meets an improbable cast of characters ranging from a washed-up scammer called Biggy who dreamt of being a musician; the parents of Yahoo Boys grappling with the implications of their sons’ line of work; local policemen and politicians; and another victim for whom the wounds have still not healed many years later.
In this extract from his book The Yahoo Boys: Real Life with the Love Scammers of Lagos, we meet one of the central characters in this tale, Chibuike, a drug addict who earned – and lost – a fortune through love bombing scams. His speciality? Pretending to be the WWE wrestler Cody Rhodes.
The Yahoo Boys: Real Life with the love scammers of Lagos
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. It was my first time meeting Chibuike, a guy my age, and everything he said sounded absurd. How could this twenty-eight-year-old man sitting across from me in dirty clothes that smelled of sour sweat and with grime under his long fingernails have scammed tens of thousands of dollars but now was not even able to afford a loaf of bread?
I studied him more closely, wondering if he was lying. Chibuike’s face was stretched out, marked by a prominent forehead scar and two deep, elongated eyes that, in another time, in another circumstance, might have been beautiful. His skin was tense and weathered, like a drum played too long under the Lagos sun. He answered my questions without hesitation. Sometimes he half smiled when recounting something that sounded preposterous, as if he knew how his response might land but felt no need to sell it. No, he wasn’t boasting; there was a distracted, almost absent-minded quality to his speech, like someone remembering rather than making something up. He didn’t seem proud of his exploits, or even particularly interested in how I might react. Just matter-of-fact.
Over the next three hours, and in dozens of interviews over the following year, I tried to reconcile the man slumped in front of me with the stories he told. Whenever I pointed out the gulf between what he’d done and what he’d become, he just shrugged, his bones lifting the long frame of his wire-thin body. Sometimes he blamed drugs. Other times, people in Ikotun: fake friends, a betraying girlfriend. And sometimes he’d say, “I showed you the stack of gift cards. I showed you the conversations,” as if the memory of that money was the last thing he had left to prove his worth.
But Chibuike always rationalised his choices by making reference to the same thing: a loveless childhood. He said he had felt completely alone in the world for as long as he could remember, and spending money on people was his way of filling that void. “I used my money to draw friends around because I was lonely. I never had someone to keep me company,” he told me. Chibuike settled his friends’ bills for the illusion of companionship, just as his victims had paid him for the illusion of love.
Looking back, he would sum up his childhood and teenage years in one word: loneliness. “I felt like I had no sisters, no brothers, no father, no mother,” he told me. “They didn’t take me as their own blood, so I had to look elsewhere.”
Chibuike spent most nights dancing. He loved Afrobeats, breakdancing, and hip-hop, always impressing everyone with his backflips. Initially, he danced just for fun, but soon night club managers in Ikotun began paying him and his friends. It wasn’t much, just enough to survive until the next party. The real generosity came from the clientele, young men who spent money freely, almost recklessly. Some of them did “dorime”— Nigerian slang for lavish spending, particularly ordering bottles of alcohol and having them delivered with sparklers, all to the tune of the song Ameno, whose main lyrical hook is the fake Latin word “dorime”. Chibuike also witnessed some of them doing dorime with bottles of water: they would pay fifty times its value just to show off.
Chibuike had always known about Yahoo Boys. In a place like Ikotun, you had to be blind not to see them. But it was during those nights spent dancing that he decided to become one.
He first asked a friend for help. The friend taught him the basics, but left the neighbourhood after a couple of months. To keep learning, Chibuike listened carefully to the guys on the street talking about terms like “formats” ,“billings”, and “updates”, and what to do when the client asked for a video call. Meanwhile, Chibuike tried all sorts of “jobs”: man to woman, woman to man, hookup, buying and selling fake goods on Facebook Marketplace… without success. He sometimes got ten dollars, but he normally failed. No matter what he did, white clients stopped replying to his messages at some point. God, should I leave this hustle? Chibuike thought. For two years, he made barely any money.
“I was always getting promises,” Chibuike remembered years later. “Clients would say, ‘I will send you the money today.’ But I got nothing.” Instead of quitting, Chibuike changed his strategy: he began impersonating the world champion wrestler Cody Rhodes. “Celeb” scams were becoming increasingly popular. In Lagos, you could bump into young guys who pretended to be Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or Johnny Depp online. Chibuike chose Cody Rhodes because he knew all about the wrestler’s background. His stepdad was a big fan of WWE – he always rooted for John Cena – and watched the fights with Chibuike on an LG plasma TV. The matches were one of the few times they didn’t argue, and Chibuike got used to watching the fights live on YouTube. It was important for him to know when Rhodes was in the ring, so his victims wouldn’t find out that they weren’t speaking to the real wrestler.
Choosing to impersonate Cody Rhodes turned out to be a smart move for Chibuike’s scamming career. Little did Chibuike know, though, how drastically his life was about to change.
How Chibuike became Cody Rhodes
One Monday in 2018, Chibuike woke up in Ikotun with only one hundred naira in his pocket. Feeling hungry, he spent it all on sugar, garri, and water. As he mixed the cold water with the starchy cassava flour, the twenty-two-year-old was already wondering what he would eat next.
A couple of hours later, he received a Facebook notification on his phone: a white woman in Ireland named Theresa had accepted his friend request. “How do I know you’re the real Cody Rhodes?” Theresa texted him. She had encountered many people calling themselves “Cody Rhodes” on Facebook, all asking for money. To convince her that he was indeed Cody Garrett Runnels Rhodes, Cody’s real name, Chibuike did three things. First, he sent her a driver’s licence he had edited with a friend’s iPhone a few weeks earlier. Then he used reverse psychology, asking her if she was being real with him. “I don’t want someone who’s gonna play around me,” he said, insisting that he lived in Florida with his daughter while secretly in the process of divorcing his wife, Brandi.
Last, he called her. “This is WWE Cody, aka Cody Rhodes,” Chibuike said, deepening his voice to imitate the wrestler’s. They talked for almost two hours. Initially, Theresa was afraid of heartbreak. Her husband had left her a year earlier, and she was still processing the trauma. But Chibuike convinced her quickly. “How long have you been watching my matches?” he asked. “A couple of years,” she replied. She was obsessed with Cody Rhodes’s “shiny” hair. “I would love to meet you,” he said, “but being a WWE wrestler, we have to go through some processes to meet each other.” He told her about filling out a “vacation form.” If she paid some money, they could meet up in person.
Several hours after their phone conversation, Theresa sent him three gift cards worth one hundred euros each. It was Chibuike’s first big cash-out. To celebrate it, he treated himself to a big meal, bought a better phone (thirty-five thousand naira), and gold earrings (fifty thousand naira). The rest he “flexed” on drinks for his friends. He had earned more from her in a single day than he had in eighteen months at the water factory.
• The Yahoo Boys: Real Life with the Love Scammers of Lagos, published by W&N, is out now priced £22; weidenfeldandnicolson.co.uk